And so, crawling from the deepest muck-filled tubes of the internet, I return to the blogosphere. What kept me away so long, other than my proven track record of not posting with anything resembling regularity? A combination of things, really. Moving out of state, moving in with my fiancee’s family, massive lag issues keeping me out of WoW for months, but mostly, a lack of anything to say. Thankfully, for the two of you who will read this(I can be optimistic), now I have something to say.

Space: the final frontier. To boldly go where no other MMO has gone before, and make it just…so…blah.

We’ll start with the good. Space combat is fun, if a tad bit much spacebar spam, and some tactics do come into play, especially(but not only) during space combat pvp. It would be nice if there were multiple classes of the newb ship, or the grind to get to the second tier of ships was shorter, but hey, very minor thing.

I absolutely love the concept of having a built in 5-man group using bridge officers and security(red shirts) while soloing. The AI is decent, and you have the ability to control the NPCs to some extent.

Aaaaaaaand that’s pretty much it for the good. Sadly, and with heavy hearts longing for our one chance to bring the wonderfully vivid, imaginative world of Star Trek interactively into our living rooms, we move on to the bad.

Sector block travel, the way you get from system to system, is painfully slow. I understand there needs to be travel time, but it just feels sluggish and boring.

And, quite possibly the worst offender, the Briar Patch. This is a system filled with explosive gas that makes full impulse(fast movement, major penalty that takes time to diminish to attack, shields, and auxiliary power which affects turn rate, some special abilities), impossible. You have to take out ten turrets and some enemy ships, then storm a base. Gas clouds spawn all over that, if any weaponsfire happens near them, causes them to explode for ridiculous damage that bypasses shields to anything within 4km, which is kinda big(max weapon range is 10km). At times useful for taking out turrets and ships, more often than not you will find yourself blown up. And sent back to the entrance, because regardless of the map being somewhat large, and slow to traverse, unlike many(most?) other space missions, you have only the one respawn location. Just terrible mission design, completely lacking in polish. And the only way to really do the mission in any reasonable amount of time is to fly above the gas clouds, where half the turrets can’t target you, which just feels cheaty.

Murder, Death, Kill. So many of the missions involve busting a phaser cap in Klingons, or Klingon allies, it’s frigging ridiculous. Yes, we get it, the Federation and Klingon Empire are at war. But outside of a tiny number of scripted events, all space combats are to the death. No opponent, even non-Klingon enemies such as pirates, fight to the death with no survival instinct to flee, even if just to recharge shields. There is such little diplomacy in the game that it’s negative amounts. Every time you complete a mission, a war breaks out in a third world country. For realz.

Polish. It’s what’s helped to keep WoW the top MMO ever. This game? Very little. It feels slapped together, ground combat is awkward at best, mere days before launch and there are still what appear to be placeholder NPCs(from Champions Online) in dialogue options. The game is being rushed, it shows, and unless Cryptic has some major patching planned for very early, I think it will be the death of this game.

Instancing/Zoning. There is no contiguous feel to the game world. It’s so split up into system zones, and sector block zones, with instance caps of 50, and in some case 5 players, that it barely feels like an MMO.

Now, I may seem like I’m being harsh, but none of these issues are unfixable. Two more months of development, beta testing(with controlled numbers, and not open beta access being used as a marketing tool to sell preorders), communication between testers and devs, and this game would have a much better chance. It would be a pretty awesome game, one I would definitely play. Sadly, this is not going to happen. The bottom line is being put before producing a quality product, and it’s going to sink it.

I want this game to be good. I love Star Trek, and wish desperately that this game would live up to the awesome IP it’s based on. And there’s some just downright cool stuff. Being able to design your own, right down to the game mechanics influencing racial traits(think D&D 3/3.5 feats)? Brilliant. Leonard Nimoy voiceovering sector overviews? Incredible. But these are just small things, awesome by themselves, but not nearly enough to overcome the incredibly meh gameplay with it’s many issues.

I guess, then, there’s just one thing left to say. Help us, Bioware, you’re our only hope.